Blog Action Day: Poverty

By now you've had a full day of reading great blogs about Poverty, the topic for this year's Blog Action Day. I'm late, as usual, but I made it, finally!

I don't really have a big long post where I'll try to solve the poverty problem through growing magic food in my magic garden, I just want to tell you a quick story.

Since Spring 2008 I've been working with my garden blogging buddy, J Snappy on developing a community garden for our small village outside the city of Chicago. Our preferred location for the garden is situated in a heavily trafficked area, near the highway, and a gas station where drug dealing goes on a lot more than we'd like. At our first volunteer recruiting event, one of the hottest topics was the homeless guy who lives under the bridge at the perimeter of the potential garden property and how he'd probably bother us too much and steal all our food we'd grown.

"What about the vandalism"

"What about the homeless people stealing our veggies?"

In response to the hyper-concern about the homeless dude stealing our food, J proudly suggested that we offer a small free plot to the homeless dude and give him a few plants to grow himself. That way he could become involved and invested in our garden, not steal and grow some food to feed himself.

I thought J's idea was great and such an awesome illustration of how many people view poverty-stricken individuals and how changing the way we think of poverty could be so powerful. Rather than sitting around being so afraid that the people who have nothing will rob us blind, we should be thinking of ways to "give them their own plot", like J said. It all starts with how we view poverty, right?

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